"Linotte" is the name [Anaïs Nin] gives herself as she signs letters to her father, Joaquin Nin, the Spanish composer and pianist. It is an old-world term for "finch" or linnet, and traditionally in French it means "scatterbrain," a girl with foolish ideas. Often at the end of a passage, especially one full of conflicts, contradictions and impossible dreams, Anaïs characterizes herself in that way. If she is writing directly to her father, she habitually ends by apologizing for her ideas of a "linotte."

The diary is almost a continuous letter to her father…. The purpose in writing these daily episodes in the letters is to reconvert the distant father to his family, to urge him to rejoin them in New York, and to stress her own longing for him….

This early diary anticipates the reconciliation later in France (told in Volume I of the "Diary...